Currently, Long Term Evolution (LTE) Advanced (LTE-A) aims to provide significantly enhanced services by mechanisms of higher data rate and lower latency with reduced cost. The two duplex modes of the LTE-A system are the Frequency-Division Duplex (FDD) mode and the Time-Division Duplex (TDD) mode. For a FDD LTE system, the transmission and reception may be operated on a different frequency, while the TDD LTE system may operate the transmission and reception on the same frequency but at a different subframe.
The TDD LTE system typically should also be compatible with a legacy system such as, for example, a Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA) system to avoid serious uplink (UL) or downlink (DL) interference because the TDD LTE system and the TD-SCDMA system may share the same site and may operate on an adjacent frequency. To minimize interference, overlap between uplink and downlink even from a different frequency and a different system should typically be avoided. To achieve this, a current or legacy TDD LTE system may utilize a special subframe configuration (also referred to herein as special subframe configuration 5) which may need to be configured to guarantee there is no uplink and downlink overlap between the LTE system and the TD-SCDMA system. The special subframe configuration may have, for example, a Downlink Pilot Time Slot (DwPTS) of three symbols, a Guard Period (GP) of nine symbols and a Uplink Pilot Time Slot (UpPTS) of two symbols (e.g. DwPTS: GP:UpPTS=3:9:2).
To further increase the resource efficiency, LTE-Advanced Release 11 (also referred to herein as Rel-11) is currently agreeing to/approving an additional special subframe configuration (also referred to herein as special subframe configuration 9) corresponding to, for example, a DwPTS of six symbols, a GP of six symbols and a UpPTS of two symbols (e.g. DwPTS:GP:UpPTS=6:6:2) for a normal Cyclic Prefix (CP). At present, there is no suitable corresponding signaling procedure to support this additional special subframe configuration (e.g., special subframe configuration 9 for normal CP).
In view of these drawbacks, it may be beneficial to provide an efficient and reliable mechanism for providing a signaling procedure to support additional special subframe configurations.